Fox News' America's Newsroom opened today with a segment covering a new Kaiser Family Foundation study that found that health insurance premiums are 9 percent higher this year than last year. Guest Charles Payne of the Fox Business Network tried to portray this increase as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and then at the very end of the segment host Bill Hemmer finally reported the facts: Only about 1.5 percentage points of the increase are related to provisions of the ACA, as reported by News Corp.'s own Wall Street Journal.

Hemmer framed the segment as a "debate over how much of this increase is related to the new health care law." Payne assured him that "there's no doubt, Bill, that a lot of this has to do with the health care law," blaming the law's provisions allowing young people to remain on their parents' insurance plan till age 26 and requiring coverage of preventive procedures. Payne then speculated that insurance companies are raising premiums in anticipation of more provisions of the ACA coming into effect, and Hemmer responded, "This might be only the beginning."

In fact, this trend is not new. Health expenditures have been increasing in the United States since the 1970s and have been shooting up dramatically since the beginning of the 1990s, long before the Affordable Care Act came into being:

In a Newsweek article titled "Roger's Reality Show," Howard Kurtz wrote that Fox executives acknowledge that the news channel "took a hard right turn." This admission confirms what has long been clear: that Fox's news division has been slanted.

At the Fox News-Google GOP presidential debate, co-moderator Chris Wallace used the pejorative term "illegals" to refer to undocumented immigrants and read a question from the public that used the term, as well. Journalists have called on the media to stop using the term "illegals," but Fox's "straight news" shows use it consistently nonetheless.

In the rush to cover the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that received a loan guarantee from the federal government, many news media outlets have misrepresented or omitted key facts.

In another installment of Fox's ongoingseries bemoaning the purported job-killing effect of regulations, America's Newsroom anchor Martha MacCallum called a new Seattle ordinance requiring paid sick leave for employees another "entitlement" that could put small businesses "under water."

Fox spent last week promoting GOP talking points on regulation, obscuring the myriad public health benefits from the conversation. In this case, paid sick leave for employees -- particularly in the food service industry, where access to such leave is the least accessible -- has obvious public health benefits.

A 2008 study [PDF] by Human Impact Partners, an Oakland, California, nonprofit organization, found significant benefits from a similar law proposed for the state of California:

As part of a weeklong series helping to push an anti-regulatory agenda, Fox News is citing a discredited estimate that regulations cost businesses on average $161,000 each year. The estimate, which comes from a report prepared by outside researchers for the Small Business Administration, has been criticized for using a flawed research design, cherry-picking the highest cost estimates, and relying on "crude" data.

Fox News' opinion shows predictably bashed President Obama's jobs plan after it was introduced during a joint session of Congress Thursday night. Making a mockery of Fox's claim that there is a distinction between its news and opinion programming, Fox's supposedly "straight news" shows picked up right where its opinion shows left off.

During an interview with Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ) on today's edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, purported "straight news" anchor Martha MacCallum attacked Obama's jobs plan as unlikely to succeed claiming that the "original stimulus plan ... didn't work, as evidenced by the employment numbers and every other indication in the economy that we've seen." The claim that the stimulus failed is a myth that economists have debunked, although that hasn't stopped Fox from pushing the claim.

The following hour on America's Newsroom, Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, repeated the myth that the stimulus failed, saying that "the part" of the plan calling for increased infrastructure spending "sound[ed] like 'Son of Stimulus,' like we were back to the future in February of 2009, and it just hasn't worked." He later added: "You know, you look at the results of the stimulus from 2009 where they promised it would keep unemployment under 8 percent and we haven't been -- you know, we've been over 8 percent for the last 28 months."

Shortly after Wallace made his remarks, MacCallum again bashed the plan, this time suggesting that what the economy really needs is renegotiation of union contracts. MacCallum said: "A lot of the union membership out there has been very supportive of a lot of more conservative ideals. The union leadership has fought tenaciously to hold onto its political position, even though the membership in this country is down to something like 7 percent of American workers that are in unions." She later said: "It is simple math in terms of many of these contracts that have been promised that simply cannot be fulfilled in so many cases for unions. So we need to go back to the drawing board in a lot of those cases."

Fox News routinely blurs the line between its supposed "straight news" and opinion programs. This is just one of the more obvious efforts of the two divisions to campaign against Obama.

Conservative media figures are citing the discredited myth that the stimulus failed to argue that President Obama's jobs plan also will not help the economy. In fact, economic analysts have repeatedly said that the 2009 recovery act boosted the economy and increased employment, and economists estimate that Obama's jobs plan is likely to add millions of jobs.

The New York Times was forced to issue two corrections after relying on Capitol Hill anonymous sourcing for its flawed report on emails from former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Clinton debacle is the latest example of why the media should be careful when relying on leaks from partisan congressional sources -- this is far from the first time journalists who did have been burned.

Several Fox News figures are attempting to shift partial blame onto Samuel DuBose for his own death at the hands of a Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop, arguing DuBose should have cooperated with the officer's instructions if he wanted to avoid "danger."

Iowa radio host Steve Deace is frequently interviewed as a political analyst by mainstream media outlets like NPR, MSNBC, and The Hill when they need an insider's perspective on the GOP primary and Iowa political landscape. However, these outlets may not all be aware that Deace gained his insider status in conservative circles by broadcasting full-throated endorsements of extreme right-wing positions on his radio show and writing online columns filled with intolerant views that he never reveals during main stream media appearances.